Intomobile is reporting that DataViz is bringing Word, Excel and Powerpoint editing to the iPhone. This is great news, but at the same time, somewhat useless. As James from the site notes:
“If you’re out of the office, no problem. Edit up that proposal and send it back to the office or to your client… Heck, even do it from the golf course!?”
Now if you must play golf, there is already a problem 😉
But the iPhone issue is that you can’t just receive, edit and send documents, because of the device’s lack of a shared user-addressable file space.
Scenario 1: You receive an email with a Word document that needs editing. But, you can only view it in the email client. There is no way of moving it to the DocumentsToGo application’s file sandbox for editing.
Scenario 2: You want to edit a file with DocumentsToGo. When finished, you want to send it out by email. Err, similar problem!
On the iPhone, you can only view certain file types that you receive by email, and you can only send photos (plus other documents that are forwarded).
It would be great if DataViz could to pass the edited file to the email client as an attachment, but I’m not sure if the SDK allows for that. Failing that, I also think it unlikely that DataViz are going to be allowed to implement an email client within their application in order to send emails (although others have implemented browsers within their apps, such as 1Password). Frasier Spiers’ Exposure passes a url to the email client, but that’s the most that has been allowed, as far as I’m aware.
My intuition is that while “on-the-go”, your file is staying on your device.